Inaugural Issue

Welcome to the first edition of TEAMinformer, our quarterly newsletter aimed at providing valuable information about developments in Enterprise 2.0, as well as keeping you up to speed on TEAM happenings. 

Is there a specific type of technology you’d like to know more about? Would you like additional details on one of our articles? We are writing this newsletter with you in mind, which means we need your feedback! Feel free to contact us any time, for any reason.

We hope you find value in this edition!
 

New Feature in SharePoint 2010 & Oracle WebCenter 11g - Expertise Location

Expertise is defined as special skill or know-how. Why is finding that expertise important in the course of doing business? Organizations such as MIT, IBM, NASA, and Sun Microsystems have not only documented their reasons why, but also published studies of examples in practice. Examples point to the conclusion that "people" often provide the most practical answers to problems as opposed to finding information without reference to context of history.

Expertise location systems can help in connecting the right people. MIT Sloan Management Review points out two things to consider when approaching this topic, 1) Understand how people's credentials will be entered, validated, and standardized, and more importantly, how they will be continually updated over time, and 2) How to evaluate people’s capability to assist the situation. Are they willing, trustworthy, and able to communicate effectively?

During recent product evaluations of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Oracle WebCenter 11g, we investigated new features including expertise location in both products. A view on this topic is outlined next.

SharePoint 2010 - Ask Me About
Microsoft continues to offer User Profile management in SharePoint 2010. The new "Ask Me About"  functionality offers users the ability to add keywords and tags to their user profiles. This allows additional search capability related to their personal skills and interests. Tagging can be targeted at Social or Expertise. One function that relates to this is Ratings. Comments can be attached to content on a rating scale. This will eventually be tied back to the user profile and search index.

WebCenter 11g - Intelligent Collaboration
Oracle takes a step toward balancing organizations' desire for collaborative sharing of expertise and the need to minimize interruptions for the sake of productivity of the “expert”.
WebCenter IC is made up of two key technologies:

1) Indexing – Automatic Profile Creation by continually extracting relevant terms from unstructured user content. Creates private, secure profiles for everyone in the organization through integration with email and E2.0 repository sources (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, Oracle Beehive Email, Oracle UCM, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Beehive Workspaces)

2) Brokering – Secure Connection Brokering uses private profiles and finds the most knowledgeable people on a topic. Instead of telling the requester who these people are, the system acts as a middleman to broker a connection between the parties. This allows the experts to decide whether to reveal themselves or not (opt-in model).

This supports a strong privacy model and is a big step toward the continual update of profile data based on current activities and communications.

Expertise location is becoming a unique alternative to internal email blasts. This technology complements other social software tools such as blogs, wikis, and collaboration repositories.
 

Google Search Appliance 6.8 Highlights

TEAM’s involvement as a Google Enterprise Partner and participant in the GSA Beta Program permits us an early look at software updates and testing of TEAM’s GSA Connector products. Several of the GSA 6.8 updates we found worth noting are below.

Cloud Connect – The GSA can now serve content in the cloud from sources such as:
• Google Apps
• Google Site Search
• Twitter
These are NOT indexed items and do NOT count against the content number indexed. These are real-time requests.

People Search – A new “People Search” allows clients to index user information from Active Directory using an included LDAP connector. These WILL count against the content count.

Dynamic Navigation – An updated Dynamic Navigation allows users to drill-down or filter results by metadata.

Active-Active Mirroring – The GSA now supports Active-Active Mirroring (Load-Balancing). Previously, Active-Passive was supported.

ACL Management – New ACL scaling with pattern-matching, and new support for per-URL ACLs for per-document fast authorization(essentially advanced ACL caching to provide more efficient secure searches).
 

Oracle UCM 11g Updates

Oracle Content Server 11g updates are comprised of new features and core architecture changes. The most notable changes to the architecture involve running the Content Server within an App Server environment. WebLogic Server is the first App Server that Content Server is modified to run within.

Change: UCM Startup and Stop server functions – The UCM server startup and stop actions are not performed through the UCM Admin Server. They are now accessed through the WebLogic Admin Console. Alternately, the startup and stop actions can be run through scripts outside of the GUI.

Change: My Profile link has been replaced with a <Your user name> link.

Change: Home link has been removed - You have to click on the Oracle image to return to the home page.

Change: OracleTextSearch component is now part of the UCM core – OracleTextSearch is a special feature for DB search within Oracle DB only. It allows you to create special zone indexing on content that indexes individual words (like full-text indexing) but is faster because additional indexing tables are created and used. This was a separate component with UCM 10gr3, but is now part of the UCM 11g core.

New Feature: Fusion Middleware Admin UCM server performance reports - The Fusion Middleware admin console has performance reports for each managed server. These reports show items such as user access, memory allocation, and most frequently accessed items. This gives you the information to assist in tuning your Fusion Middleware environment (such as UCM) to best meet the usage style of that environment.

New Feature: Logout - WebLogic supports session state and since all authentication within UCM is through WebLogic, there is a new logout feature to allow users to logout and login to UCM.

New Feature: Add Attachments - UCM 11g now supports the ability to add attachments to content items. These attachments are additional items that you want to relate to a content item, but you don’t want them to be new UCM content items that would have all of the UCM features including metadata, search, workflow, etc. These attachments are stored as renditions of the UCM content item and do not enter the search index.

TEAM Publishes White Paper Comparing Two Popular Enterprise 2.0 Platforms

TEAM recently released a white paper entitled “Examining Enterprise 2.0 Offerings from Microsoft and Oracle” comparing Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and Oracle’s WebCenter 11g Enterprise 2.0 solutions. TEAM researched the software products and performed tests to determine how the two Enterprise 2.0 platforms address 6 requirement categories – User Interaction, Social Environments, Cross-System Integrations, A Secure Work Environment, Adaptability to Change, and Manageability. This paper is aimed at Line of Business Managers considering business implications of the technologies – although comprehensive research underpins the content of this paper. Reply to this newsletter to request a copy of the full version!

Coming soon: To supplement this research, TEAM is releasing a Tech Brief outlining scalability testing results. If you are interested in receiving a copy once this is released, reply to this email and we will send you a copy once it is available. 

Nuance Communications wins Oracle Blazer at OpenWorld 2010

Congratulations to Nuance Communications on receiving the 2010 Oracle E2.0 Blazer Award for ECM – External Facing Website at Oracle OpenWorld. Nuance is an international computer software technology company and TEAM client. Nuance received this award because of their innovative use of Enterprise Content Management to create highly visible, customer-facing websites.

Being a large and diversified organization, the task of maintaining a website for so many disparate businesses can be an awesome task. Added to this, the previous version of www.nuance.com was largely written in classic ASP. By moving www.nuance.com into Oracle UCM with content management, TEAM was able to assist in implementing a solution for Nuance that allowed for a more decentralized input system, with appropriate approvals and workflows, more decentralized roles and responsibilities, departmentalized ownership of website by business division, and a consistent look and feel of website through templates and forms. It also allows for multi-language countries to drive their content off of a single source of truth to ensure consistent global messaging and branding.

Nuance’s implementation has been featured in Oracle’s E2.0 Blog and within an Oracle issued press release. 
 

TEAM Expands Globally

We completed the purchase of Sydney-based TEAMFusion5 – initially a joint venture between TEAM Informatics Inc. and Fusion5 Pty Ltd. Following the transaction, we have renamed TEAMFusion5 to TEAM Informatics Pty Ltd and have formed a subsidiary in New Zealand, TEAM Informatics Limited. This is the first step toward developing a self-sustaining Australia-New Zealand (ANZ) region. This transition will enable consulting projects and enterprise support engagements to be managed locally in a highly responsive manner. Collaboration with our US group will continue, offering ANZ customers access to best practices and industry leading knowledge in Oracle ECM and related product areas.
Click here to view the press release.